The Producers Guild of America has included Moonrise Kingdom, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Skyfall among its 10 nominees for its Best Picture award (or whatever the hell they call it…the Daryl F. Zanuck award?). The other seven are the usual-usuals — Argo, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook and Zero Dark Thirty. The PGA will announce the winner at a 1.26 Beverly Hilton awards gala, which I won’t attend because I’ll be at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
The PGA Best Picture winner and the winner of the Best Picture Oscar have been one and the same for the last five years. Since the PGA began handing out awards in 1989 or thereabouts its Best Picture choice has been iin synch with the Academy roughly two thirds of the time, or 16 times over the last 23 years. You want my guess? The PGA winner will be Silver Linings Playbook while the Academy goes for dreary, pulse-quickening Lincoln. You know why? Because the PGA just wants to sell tickets and Silver Linings Playbook hasn’t that much money yet. What? Seriously, in ’06 they gave their Best Picture award to Little Miss Sunshine so maybe they’ll vote this way again.
The next nominations to get attention will come from the Writers Guild of America on Friday. But the Big Kahuna of Oscar Indicators will be the Directors Guild of America nominations next Tuesday.